Acronis Recovery – “Recover without full path”

I wasn’t able to find anything explicitly related to this using Google, and the official documentation is singularly unhelpful. So, uh, what exactly does “Recover without full path” mean?

Scenario: You have an Acronis archive that you need to restore to an alternate location. In my example, I have a whole-disk archive of Drive C:\ from an older laptop that I need to partly restore to Drive D:\ on a new laptop.

So you select the archive, switch to file view (volume view is the default), and select your files for recovery. After that, you change the Destination to a new location (it defaults to “Original location”), toggle the overwrite flag as necessary, and then you have decide whether to “Recover without full path”, where the box is checked by default.

If you leave the box checked, you will wind up with a flat recovery directory containing all of your restored files. This is probably not what you want.

So, especially if you’re coming from a Unix background, what does clearing the check box do? It restores everything down a path like so:

D:\recovered\Drive(C)

Note the Drive(C) portion of the path; after that, everything is in a directory structure relative to the original drive.